I just want to make sure i got this right before I do something.....

usin' MD 8.1, I'm tryin to play music cd's with xmms...I can't play it as a regular user; but when I start xmms as root I can play it. I did a

ls -l cdrom and got lr-xr-xr-x 1 root root
Now would I change ownership or would I set permissions?

same thing happened with my soundcard.
I changed ownership.

By default there is a group in 8.1 called audio. So add your ueser(s) to audio with userdrake or something you feel comfortable with, then open a terminal and as root or superuser do;

cd /dev
chown root.audio cdrom
You can (should) do this with all of the audio devices, then noone but users you add to the audio group have access. These are usually;
dsp dsp1 audio audio1 mixer mixer1 sequencer sequencer2 midi00 midi01 midi02 midi03
You can do them all at once by typing them like that with chown also.

I did that....now in the mnt/cdrom directory hdc shows up. I also can't play my mp3 as a user now...is that strange or what???

Aight I figured out the mp3 problem....had to go into xmms and change a preference.

OK maybe I'm lookin at this the wrong way....here is the low down...
I did a regular install of MD 8.1 I have a cd-rw that I had put in before install
Now the SCSI module was loaded etc... Now when I want to play a cd with xmms it wouldn't play it only played when I opened it in root. I did the chown root.audio cdrom that taz suggested. It helped cuz I can go into the mnt/cdrom directory now; but instead of seeing list of music (ie. track 01 and so on..) I see hdc. which is the dev of my cdrom. Should I have done a symbolic link somewhere since I have a scsi emulator loaded or should I look in another directory?
here is a copy of my fstab

/dev/hda1 / reiserfs notail 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,exec,codepage=850,ro,noauto 0 0
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom2 auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,exec,codepage=850,ro,noauto 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

I got it to work thanks for the help my linux kin-folks